Ice skating is a popular recreational activity, and there are many variations of activities that can be engaged in on ice skating rinks. The primary activities engaged in on ice skating rinks are recreational ice skating, the games of hockey, curling, figuring skating, and ice dancing. At one time, these activities were performed on “home” ice skating rinks, which primarily took place on frozen ponds, streams, and other naturally occurring bodies of water. With each of these “home” rinks, there is a real and ever present danger, especially with young children, of death by drowning and/or overexposure upon falling through ice, which is too thin to bear the load, applied. In order to eliminate the danger of “home” ice skating rinks, public ice skating rinks started being developed along with shallow portable ice skating rinks.
Issues soon arose with the public ice skating rinks as they typically require that a person go to a nearby public ice skating rink, and these facilities are not always accessible for ice skating depending on factors such as organized hockey and other private function schedules at the public ice skating rinks. Weather conditions also affect the availability of public ice skating rinks, as inclement weather may temporarily close the ice skating rinks. Public ice skating rinks also may not be proximate or accessible from one's residence. Additionally, the cost of renting ice time is very expensive, with limited availability times. Many of the availability times being either very early in the morning or very late at night, inconvenient for most people, especially those with little children or a busy work schedule.
Issues also arose with the portable ice skating rink. Originally, portable ice skating rinks were made of wood, which made them difficult to assemble, cumbersome, took up a lot of storage space, limited design creativity and were expensive to maintain as a person would need to regularly replace the wood from one year to the next. Then came portable ice skating rinks that used long plastic tubing, such as PVC piping with elbow joints. Once again the portable ice skating rink was cumbersome, took up a lot of storage space, had limited design creativity and were expensive to purchase and maintain all the required components. Other portable ice skating rinks have added on or modified previous portable ice skating rinks by varying or adding such elements as: 4″×4″ lumber pieces; curb-like structural members, wood beams and bolts; flexible metal; mini boards with triangular back supports; water inflatable tubes; slit corrugated tubes; extruded panels; with various forms of connectors and liners. Each of these variations, add-ons or combinations resulted in portable ice skating rinks to be even more expensive, cumbersome, difficult to assemble, maintain, or caused more damage to the grounds.
Thus, a heretofore unaddressed need exists in the industry to address the aforementioned deficiencies and inadequacies.